First phase of the Gengels’ dream complete

More than 10,800 Facebook “likes”: That translates into an impressive number of friends for a charity that was born of a tragedy and has emerged with a beacon of promise for the future.

With its extensive Facebook profile, rapidly expanding Twitter flock (463 followers and growing), a popular website, belikebrit.org, and mushrooming fundraising and volunteer networks, Britney Gengel’s Poorest of the Poor Fund has pursued a single over-arching goal: to build an orphanage for 66 children in Grande Goave, Haiti.

“Be Like Brit,” the nonprofit group founded by Leonard F. and Cherylann E. Gengel after the death of their teenage daughter, Britney, in the 2010 Haiti earthquake, has built a vibrant social media and online presence and grass-roots organizing platform that has helped the Holden couple raise nearly $2 million for the orphanage over the last two years.

“This year (2012) was very new to us. Because the first year we were building up Be Like Brit, most of our funding came from friends, families and supporters,” said Kristin Hervey Musser, 28, a Rutland native whom the Gengels hired as BLB’s first director last January.

For now, the first phase of the Gengels’ dream is complete.

The all-but-earthquake-proof concrete building — freshly painted in cheerful pastel blues, yellows and reds — is perched on a verdant mountainside with a sweeping view of the sea in the coastal town about 70 miles southeast of Port-au-Prince, the sprawling Haitian capital where Britney died three years ago on Jan. 12, 2010.

The orphanage opened today, with a ceremony attended by many Gengel family members and others who flew in from the United States for the occasion.

The building, the painstaking construction of which Mr. Gengel — a builder of upscale homes in Central Massachusetts — supervised during more than three dozen trips to Haiti over the last three years, is fully paid for. In addition to fundraising, the Gengels contributed more than $200,000 of their own money to the project.

Nearly all the fundraising has come in tiny donations from Facebook friends, bake sales held by neighbors in Central Massachusetts, small charity events in Midwest towns, bike rides, golf tournaments, sales of thousands of concrete blocks for the orphanage, and in-kind contributions by U.S. tradespeople and “Britsionaries,” the Gengels’ secular version of missionaries.

A September fundraising walk in Boston netted BLB $30,000, and the Holden-based nonprofit finished in the top 10 of a national 24-hour Twitter fundraising competition with $6,000.

A “Blocks for Brit” campaign, which offered concrete wall bricks for the orphanage for $10 each, raised $89,000 by selling 8,900 bricks.

“It was tangible,” Ms. Musser said. “People felt like they were a part of helping to build the orphanage.”

The Gengel family foundation has also benefited from friends in high political places. U.S. Sen. John F. Kerry, former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, and U.S. Rep. James P. McGovern, D-Worcester, have all sent out social media fundraising plugs.

Up to now, the Gengels have not received any government or foundation funding. That could change soon, though, as BLB tries to ramp up to full “NGO” (non-governmental organization) status, which would enable it to accept money from the U.S. government and large donors.

Any such new funding sources would help the Gengel family administer Brit’s Orphanage without dipping into an endowment fund that the Gengels are hoping to create with the proceeds from their book about Britney and the orphanage project: “Heartache and Hope in Haiti.” The book, written by Gary Brozek, will be released Jan. 12, on the third anniversary of Britney’s death.

The basic financial model for the orphanage is to have each child sponsored by donor families at the rate of $400 a month, with $100 a month each contributed by each family.

This revenue stream, along with book proceeds and other fundraising, is expected to pay for the orphanage staff, including a professional director, Haitian “mummys” who will care for the children, a full-time registered nurse, cooks, security guards and maintenance workers. The funds will also go toward the children’s clothes and education at a church-run school down the hill from the orphanage.

In addition to children’s rooms with bunks for 33 girls and 33 boys (the bunks were built from recycled scaffolding used to build and paint), the “B”-shaped building has six rooms for Britsionaries, the foreign volunteers who arrive every month to help out.

Going forward, the Gengels and their associates in the U.S. and in Haiti face a new, and potentially equally daunting challenge — to populate the orphanage with children while navigating the Haitian government bureaucracy.

The Gengels plan to add the orphans gradually, starting with six, “and then a few at a time,” Mrs. Gengel said. Meanwhile, they say they are confident that with a clean, modern building, clean water and septic systems (unusual in the country), on-site health care and professional and ethical management, they will withstand increased scrutiny of orphanages in Haiti.

Government officials of the impoverished island nation declared recently that they plan to inspect and close substandard orphanages. Pressure has been building to crack down on orphanages and adoptions, with as many as 80 percent of the approximately 30,000 children in Haitian orphanages and many of those adopted by foreigners thought to have at least one living parent, The New York Times reported in December.

“We are going to raise these children like our own children,” Mrs. Gengel said. The Gengels have two sons, Bernie, 20, and Richie, 17.

Contact Shaun Sutner by email at ssutner@telegram.com and on Twitter at @ssutner